Bosnian Chronicle, by Ivo Andrić

Ivo Andrić's name first came to my attention in my early research for my world books reading project; I had noted him as someone to read for Bosnia. He won the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature and is probably Bosnia's most well-known writer. Then in 2016, I stumbled across and later read Meša Selimović's The Fortress, and so seeking out Bosnian novels was no longer a top priority for me. I really can't remember what exactly it was that prompted me to order Selimović's Death and the Dervish early in quarantine, but I did and I started reading it in August. I brought it with me on the trip I took to the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, and while browsing at Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, I came across Bosnian Chronicle. Like the two Selimović books, Bosnian Chronicle is set during Ottoman rule. I was really enjoying Death and the Dervish and thought it would be interesting to compare the books' perspectives, so as soon as I finished the former, I started on Bosnian Chronicle. This was back in October, and I read about half of it then, before I set it aside to read a succession of book club books and some other books I was more in the mood for. But I was determined to finish it in 2020, and so in the last 3 days I read the second half. (What remains to be seen is if I will finish the other book I had hoped to finish in 2020 by the end of tomorrow.)

Despite their common settings and, frankly, similarly slow pace, Bosnian Chronicle is quite different from Death and the Dervish. The title of the book is sometimes translated as The Time of the Consuls, because the book centers on the French, and to a lesser extent the Austrian, consuls who have settled in the regional capital Travnik to advance their governments' respective interests with the local Ottoman authorities. Bosnia was a strategic location, with the French controlling the Dalmatian coast to the south and with the Austro-Hungarian border to the north, but it was also a backwater. Not just the French and Austrian consuls, but also the Ottoman viziers (local governors) feel that they've been relegated to an out-of-the way place, uncivilized and lawless. The characterization of Bosnia as backwards and forlorn struck me as surprising, coming from a Bosnian writer.* The book really seems to take the view of the consuls, who come from the heart of civilized Europe and are infected with "Oriental fever," a sense of malaise and helplessness on the Eastern frontier. 

I also had some trouble reconciling the populace in Selimović's books with that in Andrić's. I learned somewhere in relation to my reading of Death and the Dervish that Sarajevo at roughly the turn of the 19th Century, was divided into neighborhoods/districts. I forget the exact numbers, but something like 80 of these districts were Muslim, 12 Orthodox Christian, and 4 Jewish, which suggests to me an overwhelmingly Muslim country. And yet, in the Andrić (which I will grant, takes place in a different city), regular Muslims (i.e., not Ottoman officials) seem barely present. Though perhaps it's just that the consuls don't interact with them. Meanwhile, they do interact with the local Catholics, the Orthodox leaders, and with the Jews.** 

Bosnian Chronicle spans a seven year period, during which world events far from Bosnia loom large, but not much changes in Bosnia itself. There is unrest in Istanbul, there are two wars between France and Austria, there is Napoleon's attempted expansion into Russia, and his eventual downfall and change of government in France. The local Ottoman vizier is replaced, then replaced again. Through all of this, the consuls sit in Travnik awaiting news and sending reports of local activity out into the ether, where there is no suggestion they are ever read. Which is very much the mood of the book itself: not much happens. What Andrić does beautifully is deep character studies, not just of the central figures in the story, but here and there of regular people as well, some of whom have no bearing on the events in the book. 

This is rather incidental to the book overall, but I've long had a fascination with the survival of the Ladino language into the 20th Century and there was an odd but really beautiful moment at almost the very end of Bosnian Chronicle where one of Travnik's Jewish elders comes to visit the French consul to offer his help for the consul's return trip to France. They have a stumbling conversation, but then Andrić goes on to write a two-page approximation of what the elder would have said if he could articulate himself better. He writes about the Jewish expulsion from Spain and the sense of loss that survived over generations and centuries. "Cut off completely from our own people and those close to us, we endeavour to preserve what is Spanish -- songs and food and customs -- but we feel everything in us changing, being spoiled and forgotten. We remember the language of our country, as we brought it with us three centuries ago and as it is no longer spoken even there, and we stutter comically in the language of the rayah with whom we suffer and of the Turks who rule us." This bit is extracted from somewhere in the middle, but the whole thing was so moving for me. Andrić wrote Bosnian Chronicle during World War II, which makes this passage feel particularly significant. I was very surprised to learn that Andrić was in fact the Yugoslavian ambassador to Germany at the start of the war, but perhaps this gave him extra insight into its methods. The Sephardic population of Bosnia was almost completely decimated in the war. According to this article, there were only four Ladino speakers left in Sarajevo in 2016. 

This was a slow read -- sometimes painfully so, but I'm very glad I kept at it. The end, where the French consul realizes that things have come full circle for him and the path forward he had always imagined is does not go forward at all, was particularly beautiful. 

*When I was reading Death and the Dervish I somewhere came across a reference that said Andrić and Selimović as well, toward the end of his life, allied themselves with Serbia though they were both from Bosnia. What exactly this meant for people living in then-unified Yugoslavia is not entirely clear to me (I really feel I need to read more about the history of the region), but I gather that Serbia was the cultural and intellectual center and that even in unified Yugoslavia, Bosnia's status as a backwater remained. (The events after the breakdown of Yugoslavia seem to suggest this to me as well.) In fact, Serbia hangs in the background of Bosnian Chronicle quite a bit, and it's hard not to read into it a little. The Christian Serbians resisted Ottoman rule, and year after year the Ottomans of Bosnia wage war in Serbia against the infidels, but the subjugation of Serbia is elusive. 

**In looking for the source of those numbers I estimated, I pulled out Death and the Dervish, and something like what I've just written is actually addressed in the introduction. Says Henry Cooper, Jr., who wrote the introduction in 1996 or thereabouts, "Selimović's Bosnia is extraordinarily uniform. In this regard it bears no resemblance whatsoever either to the colorful variegatedness of Andrić's Bosnia, or to the reality of the country, which was once celebrated as a multiethnic, multicultural, multireligious society and is now being punished for it."

Roseanna, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

I said I was going to go back to one of the books I started earlier this year but have yet to finish, and I did read one more chapter of Ivo Andrić's Bosnian Chronicle (I still hope to finish it this year), but then I decided to do the other thing I said I might do, which was read one of the Sjöwall/Wahlöö Martin Beck mysteries. Maj Sjöwall died in May of this year, having outlived Per Wahlöö by 45 years, which somehow strikes me as really sad. I'm a completist by nature, which means that my impulse when approaching novel series is always to start at the beginning. With mystery novels, this usually isn't strictly necessary, but it's hard for me to do otherwise. In fact, I think this impulse sometimes keeps me from reading mystery novels because I feel I must start in the right place, and then what if I don't have book two? And perhaps I wait until I have a good chunk of the series from the beginning before I start, which means I never start because the way I acquire books is mostly happenstance.*

With Martin Beck, I broke my own rule. I don't think I ever thought I would read others in the series, or perhaps when I read The Locked Room (the eighth of ten in the series) I didn't even know it was part of a series. I can't remember. It seems to me that I had gotten it into my head that The Locked Room was an important book. At the time, I think I'd read very few mystery novels and also was not completely hooked on BBC mystery TV programs. Although I had previously read -- many years before -- Paul Auster's The Locked Room, I didn't know "the locked room" as a mystery trope. I thought it was all down to this book. But Sjöwall/Wahlöö's The Locked Room is a lot more than a locked room mystery. The detectives get it wrong -- and it's truly satisfying. (I always say I love TV murder mysteries because there's a formula and you know you will have the satisfaction of a resolution in 45-90 minutes. My appetite in books is different, and I wonder if I would enjoy The Locked Room if it were a TV program?) 

Anyway, several years ago, I read The Locked Room. I liked it. I moved on. Then, a couple months ago I found Roseanna at my local Little Free Library. A few weeks after that, I found the second of the Martin Beck novels, The Man Who Went Up In Smoke at a thrift store. So, here I am with the first two books in the series and my impulse toward completion and a couple days ago I decided to start at the beginning. I didn't think Roseanna was nearly as interesting as The Locked Room, but I enjoyed reading it and found particular satisfaction in picking out clues as it went along. I don't think I'll jump right into book two, but at least I have it for when the mood strikes.

* They're not mysteries, but for years, I've intended to read Émile Zola's complete Rougon-Macquart books. Of the 20 book cycle, I have 13, including the first but not the second. I've actually already read books 8 and 17, but this completist impulse makes me feel I need to start at the top and proceed from there. Maybe 2021 will be my Zola year? (I say this every year. If anyone wants to start a Zola book club, please ... join me.)

The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain

I started my extended holiday break from work this afternoon around 2:30. I'm off until January 4. With the eight days left in the year, I plan to finish at least 2 of the books I've started but not yet finished this year. But this morning, I decided to clean my apartment before starting work instead of picking up a book. When I logged off this afternoon, I thought about picking up one of those books and I just wasn't in the mood. And so I looked at my shelves and I considered Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (and it has just come to my attention that Sjöwall died this year, so maybe I should read one of their books next!), but I looked to the left on my shelf and saw the slim copy of The Postman Always Rings Twice and thought I could probably finish it in an afternoon. I did, in just over two hours. 

I am, at this moment, listening to a recording of Maria Callas performing an aria from Don Carlo and I had a thought: The Postman Always Rings Twice could be an opera. I didn't have this thought when I was reading it, or when I started writing this over two hours ago (I broke for dinner), but now that I've had this thought, I'll expand on it. A quality of many operas that I've always found rather hilarious, when I step back and look dispassionately at it, is the spareness and speed of plot development. This was exactly the feeling I had reading The Postman Always Rings Twice. This book was all plot, there's no character development: you only understand them (if you understand them, which is an open question) through the plot. Nearly every new development seems to come out of left field. This may sound like criticism, but it's not entirely. (Have I mentioned that I love opera, and the humor I find in the sparse plots is one of the things I find endearing about it?)

I read Mildred Pierce several years ago, and it was not at all what I was expecting. Reading it, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never quite did. I was anticipating destitution, but that's not where it went. Thinking back on it now, maybe that ominous feeling I had while reading it was one of the book's strengths. My only other exposure to James M. Cain comes from the movie adaptation of Double Indemnity, which I've seen more times than I can say. There was a fleeting moment, while reading The Postman Always Rings Twice, where I remembered Mildred Pierce and thought maybe things would turn out okay for the protagonists. Unlike Mildred Pierce, though, they're murderers, so of course it doesn't. Double Indemnity is the closer relation. (The murdered husbands even have the same insurance policy! Was it actually routine that getting killed in a railway accident paid out double in the 1930s?!) But where in Double Indemnity, one character is played and one is the player, The Postman Always Rings Twice is actually a bit more complex. The deed the protagonists share turns them against each other, just when their interests should be aligned. 

Anyway, if someone wants to make a tragic opera from The Postman Always Rings Twice, please credit me. Thanks!

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong

I proposed reading On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous for my book club, in a way, so I could read it and get it off my shelf. And it's good to see that some others really liked it. My own reaction boils down to, "It's not for me." (A phrase I use most often, which is quite often indeed, to excuse myself for not being interested in prestige television.)

Should I enumerate the ways I feel I was perhaps unfair to this book? Firstly, I was never sure I wanted to read it in the first place. A friend sent it to me with a tepid appraisal (she was sending me The Nickel Boys anyway and offered to throw this in too, noting her own ambivalence about it). My friend's assessment -- and also the assessments I kept seeing was, approximately, "The language is beautiful, but..." So, yes, I was biased against it going in.

Secondly, I was rushed. I intended to start reading it at least a day or two earlier than I did. But, as I have written, I set aside all other reading last week to devote some time to John le Carré. So, as it turned out, I started reading On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous the day before yesterday, and didn't get very far that first day. I read a bit more yesterday, but I read the bulk of it today -- before work, at lunch, and after work. 

Furthermore, knowing I had to get to this ahead of my book club meeting today, I really crammed in the le Carré immediately before turning to On Earth... I read 300 pages of The Constant Gardener on Saturday (which is more pages than the entirety of On Earth...), finishing it after 10:00 that night. Le Carré left me craving action (I watched two Jason Bourne movies in as many days for satiation), so the Vuong could hardly be further from what I wanted in the moment. (Perhaps it will at least serve to change my frame of mind as I attempt to read the two other books I hope to finish in 2020, neither of which is heavy on action.)

There were pieces that I found beautiful. There were pieces that resonated. But I have the sense, partly, to be sure, because of my haste in reading, but also I think because of the book itself -- its form and style -- that in a few months, a few years this will be a book that I remember I have read but can't tell you a thing about.

The Constant Gardener, by John le Carré

Before my friend Michael, a fellow karaoke enthusiast, left New York (and in the days when one could still do karaoke), we had a tradition of honoring the deaths of beloved musicians by going out for karaoke and singing their songs. When we got the news of a death, we would convene for an "emergency" karaoke outing. In this way, we celebrated George Michael, Tom Petty, David Bowie, and some others that I'm surely forgetting. It was in the spirit of this tradition that I read The Constant Gardener this week.

I had started another book after finishing Love, but on hearing the news of John le Carré's death a week ago, I decided to stop everything and read something of his. Over the years, I'd read what I think of as the biggies: The Spy Who Came in from The Cold; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; and A Perfect Spy. Some years ago I heard or read an interview with le Carré in which he was asked which were his favorite of his own books and he included among them The Constant Gardener. This must be what prompted me to buy it used in a crappy mass market movie tie-in edition on some trip; I don't remember where. 

I had seen the movie in theaters when it was new, but it was so long ago I was pleased to find I only recalled the barest details of the story. In fact, for the first 100 pages or so I was so confused about how the story was centered that I stopped to look up the movie's cast to confirm what I thought I remembered: that Ralph Fiennes, who graced the cover of my book, played the widowed husband, a comparably minor character until the story starts to follow him on page 119. And this brings me to one of the brilliant things about the book: le Carré manages to give the reader an almost first-person intimacy with his characters, while writing in the third person. The narrative also deftly jumps through time, weaving memories and apparitions into present day. Another thing that surprised me in the book with my sparse recollection of the movie was that at the opening of the book, Tessa Quayle (Rachel Weisz) was already dead. It's strange to have a central character already dead, but the past features strongly in the book and at its core, this is a murder mystery. The end was perfect and heartbreaking, and I feel like the movie can't possibly have ended in the way the book did though I honestly don't remember. I was anticipating justice, and its absence caught me off guard: until I remembered every other John le Carré book I've read (particularly The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which ends like a punch in the gut). 

So, even though I have a stack of books I've started but not finished, plus another book I need to read by Tuesday for my book club, I'm glad I set everything aside to read The Constant Gardener and to spend the week after his death with John le Carré.

Love, by Elizabeth von Arnim

I've lost a lot of my vanity as I've aged, and I've truly found it to be very freeing. If anything, these last 9 months have cemented my anti-vain impulse more firmly. I started cutting my own hair in April and chopped off most of it in August. I often lamented how a professional life in New York seemed to demand make-up, so going without it for most of this year has been a welcome change.  I suspect there's been an increase in the number of grey hairs I have, but beyond that, I don't feel like this year has aged me. Of course, I have no exposure to a young person in the bloom of health to tell me otherwise. In fact, I don't really see anyone, particularly bare-faced, so who might look at me and say, "Wow, these months have aged you?" (I could veer off course here to finally write my angry screed about the cult of skincare, through which good skin seems to have been imbued with the weight of morality, but I won't.)

Love is a book about the relationship between Catherine, a woman a couple years older than I am, and Christopher, a man in his mid-20s. To further complicate things, Catherine is a widow with a daughter, aged 19, whose husband is Catherine's age (in fact, a year older) and is a minister. And her daughter is pregnant -- about to make Catherine a grandmother. The first half of this book, which follows Catherine and Christopher's courtship, is a comedy of manners. Christopher is a persistent, insistent admirer, who seems to have no care for Catherine's age. Even when she tells him she has an adult daughter, he's not put off. His attention and affection rejuvenate her, after a decade of never being seen as a woman independent of her role as a mother. Following her daughter's marriage, she's become even more inconsequential as she's been forced to relocate to her late husband's London apartment, while her daughter and her husband move into the family estate. With Christopher, she finds a new enjoyment of life, and a youth she never experienced in her own youth, thanks to the fact that she also had married a much older man when she was quite young. After a misunderstanding leads Catherine's son-in-law to believe she's having sexual relationship with Christopher, he pressures them to marry with the threat of not allowing Catherine to see her daughter otherwise. Christopher is thrilled and Catherine accepts it as a necessity in order to see her daughter, and decides she loves Christopher besides. Up through this moment, Love is hilarious. But in the second half of the book, things take a darker turn. Catherine feels herself aging and becomes preoccupied with the fear that Christopher will one day wake up and see her as she really is (or as she really sees herself) -- a tired, old woman. I had mixed feelings through much of the second half, and particularly bristling was the suggestion that Catherine really had aged so much -- perhaps because she was just a couple years older than me (though I'm not a widowed mother, to be fair). But then things took a totally unexpected turn in the last few chapters, and I actually found myself loving the way the book ended -- though it was a long way from the lighthearted first half.

Love was evidently loosely based on a real relationship that Elizabeth von Arnim had when she was in her 50s (a decade older than Catherine) with a man in his early 20s. I'm not sure why, but I've always find myself oddly drawn to traditional-gender-swapped May-December relationships. But reading this makes them sounds a bit heartbreaking. Do women, already under disproportionate pressure to maintain beauty and youth, in this circumstance apply that pressure to themselves doubly to keep the interest of a young partner?

The Last Policeman, by Ben H. Winters

My work gave us the full week off for Thanksgiving and the plans I set out for myself involved reading a bunch, going for walks (it comes to my attention every time I do go for a walk -- in the form of sore legs afterwards -- that I don't spend nearly as much time as I used to on my feet as I did before the pandemic), cleaning my apartment, and cooking. Four days in, I have certainly read a bunch. I've walked a little (a lazy trip to my closest little free library yesterday to drop off some books), and I've cleaned a little, and I've cooked a little (I almost caved and ordered delivery tonight but was saved by the discovery of a perfectly ripe avocado in my kitchen), so I guess the week is going to plan. (I intended to walk and clean more than I have, but it's only Tuesday.)

I read pretty solidly for most of Saturday and Sunday, so yesterday, I spent a slow morning putting away laundry and refiling the slides I sent away to be digitized and received back a few weeks ago, which have been sitting on my dining room table ever since. Around noon I showered, and then I ate lunch, and then I started The Last Policeman. And that was how I spent pretty much the rest of my day. I took a break for dinner, then went back to it. At around 8pm, I decided to stop for the day. If I had started earlier, I would have finished it yesterday. I was almost mad at myself, but what's the point. This morning, I got up and had my breakfast and did the Spelling Bee and studied my Italian and then did an online yoga class for good measure and then after yoga I had the strange idea that I should start preparing my lunch (it was 10am) so I wouldn't put it off until I was hungry. This, of course, meant that I sat down to lunch before 11:30 (which is undoubtedly why I have already eaten dinner and washed my dinner dishes as I type this at 6pm). And then I had to pick up one last item at the grocery store, which turned out to be a bigger errand than I anticipated. But I finally got home at maybe 1pm and sat down again with The Last Policeman. All that time, I think I was stalling because I didn't have all that much left to read in the book -- less than 100 pages -- and once I finished it: then what? So, as it happened, I finished it around 3pm and, yes, then what? I puttered around. I didn't clean or go for a walk. I briefly contemplated going back to Bosnian novel #2, which I set aside two weeks ago (and even more briefly considered going back to the other two novels that sit unfinished on the table by my couch). And then I started another book.

Anyway, The Last Policeman. It seems to me that it was recent, but I can't think where or from whom I got the suggestion to read it. I found a used copy a couple weeks ago and I remembered the title as something I wanted to read. And at that point, even as I was still at least two books out from getting there, I pre-selected it as the book I would read next when I was done reading my next book club selection. It seemed like just what I wanted to read at the moment, but it would have to wait. I could write now what I think I always write after reading genre fiction, which is that I don't read much genre fiction. That remains true. The Last Policeman is part of a sub-genre -- a cross-genre really -- that I'm now realizing particularly appeals to me: sci-fi mystery. The mystery drives the plot, but the context (in this case, a pre-apocalypse while earth's inhabitants wait for the planet's likely destruction by an asteroid) is what sets the mood, and that mood makes the book. Thinking this is a genre I'd like to read more of, I did a quick search and found this list of 23 best sci-fi mystery books, which includes the book I was most expecting to encounter -- The City and the City -- but also two other books I've read and enjoyed (The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Pattern Recognition -- though not, I should mention, The Last Policeman). All of these are rather light on the sci-fi (debatably sci-fi in fact), but I'm thinking this is a genre I should explore. 

Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan

A couple weeks ago, my dad and I took a little day trip to Yonkers and the Bronx and as our last stop on our way back to Brooklyn, we dropped into The Lit. Bar. The bookstore had been on my radar for a while (it opened in April 2019), but I virtually never find myself in the Bronx. It's a fantastic little shop (and bar!) with a fun, creative organization to its fiction selection. It does have a kind of general literature section, but much of the fiction is divided into small sub-categories. (In fact, their Bookshop page gives a hint of the store's organizational methods.) This kind of organization often irks me -- if I'm looking for something specific, I want to be able to find it easily.* But on this occasion, I wasn't looking for anything specific and I realized that the organization was particularly conducive to browsing. It served as a sort of recommendation system: if you like this book, maybe you'll also like the thematically similar book sitting next to it. So anyway, while I was browsing, the spine of Washington Black caught my eye. I thought I remembered that a friend had suggested it as a future book for our book club, so I texted her, received immediate confirmation, and I bought it (along with another book -- Lost City Radio, by Daniel Alarcón, an author I read about in How To Travel without Seeing).

I've missed my last few book club meetings. I kept finding myself reading the wrong thing at the wrong time. I determined to get back on track, and with my lately slow reading pace, I gave myself a little more than a week to read the next book. I finished it in two days. It's a nineteenth-century (set in, that is) coming of age story about an enslaved boy (the titular Washington Black) from a plantation in Barbados who is forced to escape and ends up on a series of adventures that take him halfway around the world, to the Arctic and the Sahara. Washington Black has the sort of high adventure quality I associate with nineteenth-century literature -- a young protagonist, caught up in events beyond his control and exposed to a world beyond his imagination. It was fully absorbing; exactly the kind of book I can sit down on the coach with and read cover to cover. It had been a while since I've done that.

*Years ago, I remember visiting the Borders (this alone dates this memory) on Broadway off Wall Street and thinking they carried no James Baldwin because he was nowhere to be found in their Fiction/Literature section. Eventually I discovered they had a separate African American Literature section, and there was the Baldwin. I was left feeling ambivalent about this organizational decision. Giving whoever made this decision at Borders the benefit of the doubt, I imagine the decision to have a separate section was to celebrate not segregate, but I couldn't help feeling the writers had been ghettoized. Didn't Baldwin belong with the capital L Literature? At the very least they could have put some shelf markers explaining where to look for Baldwin.

The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel

I almost never read books when they are new, but this year has been unusual in that respect (admittedly it's been far more unusual in other respects). The Glass Hotel was the third book I've read this year that came out in 2020. I've read another two that came out in 2019, and at least seven more from 2018 -- which I realize doesn't qualify as all that new, but still seems unusual for me. (I'm not even counting Romance in Marseille, which was published this year but written nearly a century ago.) I don't know what this means or where I'm trying to go with it; just an observation I guess.

Like everyone, I loved Station Eleven. It's one of those books I would recommend to basically anyone. By which I mean it's a book that I loved, but also one that I think has broad appeal (which is not true of many books that I love). A good friend, who also loved Station Eleven sent me The Glass Hotel for my birthday in June. I think I was half saving it, for when I felt I needed a book to throw myself into perhaps, and half afraid: could it live up to Station Eleven? Maybe that's a silly thing to be worried about (I find myself with similar sentiments thinking about Yaa Gyasi's new book, which I'm very excited for, but also: can it be as good as Homegoing? Perhaps it can. Perhaps, as I've said, this is a silly train of thought.)

I tried not to find out too much about The Glass Hotel before reading it. (I remember having to rush to turn off the radio when I heard Emily St. John Mandel start to be interviewed by Alison Stewart on All of It. Maybe I will go back and listen now.) I had heard it was about a Ponzi scheme, but that was pretty much all I knew ahead of time -- and I can't say that left me feeling particularly interested in reading it. I found the start a little slow. There was jumping around - in time, location, and among characters (familiar to readers of Station Eleven), that I think kept me from being pulled in right away. But the book grew on me. There was one reveal toward the end in particular that really worked for me. And damn if I don't want to go live in a remote luxury hotel at the far end of Vancouver Island after reading this! My urge to compare it to Station Eleven feels like a disservice to The Glass Hotel, but I find it hard to help. I liked it. A lot. I'm going to loan it to my dad, who I believe was the first person I recommended Station Eleven to. (He loved it.)

Luster, by Raven Leilani

I'm not sure why immediately on finishing one 500-page Bosnian novel that took me two months to get through, I decided the right move was to start a second 500-page Bosnian novel, but that's exactly what I did. For the past three weeks, I've been reading -- and on several days not reading -- Ivo Andrić's Bosnian Chronicle. A week ago, I thought I'd set it aside and read my next book club book, but about 10 pages into that, I decided to stick with the Andrić after all. I should say it's not just that the Andrić is slow going -- it is; but I've also been swamped with work and so exhausted during my spare moments that I haven't felt up to reading a quiet novel about Bosnia in the early nineteenth century. Yesterday afternoon, at the end of what was a 7-day work week, I thought maybe I was prepared to sit down with Andrić for a while, but I read 5 pages or so of a chapter and saw that it had 20 more pages and just didn't feel like facing it. And so I went to my bookshelves and pulled out Luster, which I bought on the spur of the moment at my local bookstore/coffee shop a couple months ago. I read a bit more than half yesterday and finished it this morning, and it was just the break I needed. (They can't be all slow Bosnian novels set during Ottoman rule.)

I enjoyed Luster. I found it interesting and beautiful in parts. I also found it strange and disconcerting. Most of all, it made me feel old. The book is about a 23-year-old who's in a relationship with a man about my age, and I felt while reading it like I was grouped in with this older, out of touch generation. (It's not just age that separates the characters, I should say: it's also race and financial security, or lack thereof, class backgrounds, childhood experiences.) I imagine it's a natural part of aging that one doesn't feel old within oneself, but that as one gets older the culture of young people -- the language they use, the way they dress, their proclivities -- feels more and more incomprehensible. This may sound strange, but I remember a moment somewhere between five and ten years ago, when clothes stopped making sense to me. I felt like the things that I understood about clothes, about how an outfit was composed, were suddenly outmoded and irrelevant, and it happened without my even noticing it. Fashion has changed again since I first had this realization, and I still find the fashion of the young rather baffling. Anyway, this novel was like that experience in book form. 

The other writer I've read who is about the same age as Leilani -- and who writes about people her own age -- is Sally Rooney, and reading this reminded me a bit of reading Rooney -- particularly Conversations with Friends. (In fact, the stories are themselves rather similar now that I think about it.) I tried while reading Luster and also while reading Conversations with Friends to remember my own precarious youth, to read with those eyes. I feel like the narrators of both books have an impulse for self-destruction that I never had, and I somehow think this is generational. This isn't to say there aren't self-destructive people in my -- and in every -- generation, but perhaps that there's a fatalism among younger people that wasn't there when I was young. These narrators also have an earnestness and vulnerability that I never allowed myself, and I feel like this too is generational. This line of thought led me to google (inadvertently adding some drama to my search history as I tried to key in the exact phrases that would get me to these articles I only faintly remembered) two articles I remembered seeing some months back exploring, or explaining, the collective internet's voiced desire to be harmed by their celebrity crushes -- another element of youth culture that leaves me feeling bemused. In fact, the particular tenor of these requests by internet teens for celebrities to step on their throats -- which is familiar to me from the time I spend on Twitter, but also foreign to me in that I feel that it references some emotion or worldview that I just can't relate to -- was very like the tone of Luster. There were long stretches that read to me like dry irony, and I wondered if they were funny. 

As it happens, I finished this book just in time to hear Raven Leilani talk about it on All Of It on WNYC, so maybe some of my questions will be answered today.

Death and the Dervish, by Meša Selimović

I've finally finished the great Bosnian novel that I had to set aside for far too long while reading other books for other reasons. I started Death and the Dervish in late August and finished part one in early September. I returned to it last Sunday and picked through it over the course of the week, but read the bulk of part two yesterday and today. This wasn't the first Selimović book I'd read; back in 2016 I read The Fortress, which I gather is something of a sequel to this book (or book two of what he intended to be a trilogy). I gave away my copy of The Fortress after reading it, but now I wish I hadn't. I don't remember it well -- I was glad to see I had written about it, because pieces come back as I read what I wrote then -- but I do remember the impression it left on me. The feelings Death and the Dervish aroused were similar, or if anything, more intense. This book was gorgeous. I've marked more pages in it than in any book I've read in recent memory. I broke my own rule of not writing in books for this book, something I do only when I know there are passages I'll want to return to again and again. 

The book spans roughly a year in the midlife of a dervish, Nuruddin, in 18th century Sarajevo. He's a respected religious leader who believes in the justness of God and the state, until his younger brother is arrested, taken to the fortress, and killed. The book follows his awakening, in a sense, to human corruption and human connection, both of which have been outside his notice in his conscribed religious life. Nuruddin walks us through the stages of grief, as it were, as he processes what has happened to his brother and the betrayal by one of his own close connections that led to his brother's arrest. As the narrative progresses, he perpetually thinks he is above earthly concerns or in control of them, and yet never -- until the very end -- understands how he is caught up in them. As he learns hate, he unleashes what he believes will be the most terrible revenge for his brother's murder, bringing down all who were responsible for it. And it works: the judge who condemned his brother is killed; the district leader is forced to flee. But the result is that Nuruddin himself is appointed as the new judge. He is put at the center of the political intrigue, and finds that he's no better than those who he brought down.

There's so much more to this book than what I've said here, and I thought I would write more, but I don't think I can do it justice. The first page I marked in this book was page 109. It's a pivotal moment in the book, when we first begin to understand what Nuruddin is grappling with. His friend, Hassan, has come to him to help him hatch a plan to free his brother from the Fortress, but Nuruddin still believes so strongly in the justness of the world that he can't bear to think of trying to break his brother out of prison. Hassan, Nuruddin tells us, "was trying to save a man, while I was trying to save an idea." By the end of the book, Nuruddin is a different man: he knows that the world is unjust; but he is not a better man. Maybe that's the most heartbreaking thing of all.

Disoriental, by Négar Djavadi

Disoriental was the third book I've read with my Idlewild Books Women in Translation Book Club. I read it in fits and starts. Lately, I haven't been much in the mood for reading, or maybe I haven't been able to find the time. With the sun rising later, I sleep later, and with my crosswords and Italian practice each morning, I'm not left with much reading time before I have to start work. And I'm never good about reading in the evening. And then I was starting to feel a little overwhelmed with book club books -- like I wasn't reading anything I had chosen to read. (Of course, choosing participate in the book club was my decision, so I do realize it's on me. One of my qualities, but also my faults, is that I have a strong -- sometimes overly so -- sense of obligation.) I started the wonderful Bosnian novel, Death and the Dervish back in late August, and ended up setting it aside for four weeks while I read three consecutive books for book clubs (for three different book clubs, I should point out -- again, this is all my own fault). Anyway, maybe this sense of obligation and that Disoriental was keeping me from Death and the Dervish biased me against it somewhat.

I did enjoy Disoriental, or at least several aspects of it. The narrative is divided between the present and past, jumping back and forth within each chapter as the narrator tells us her memories. Early on, these memories go back even before her birth and her parents' births, as she recounts family stories that have been passed down through the generations. Later they are her own memories of her childhood in Tehran, her escape as a young girl, with her mother and two sisters, from Iran over the border into Turkey and eventually onward to France. And finally some memories of her time living in France and elsewhere in Europe, bringing the reader up to the present day. I found the portions from the past to be much more engaging than the portions from the present day (and, fortunately, those make up much more of the book). But the story felt incomplete, particularly as it got nearer to the present. The period from the narrator's paternal grandmother's birth up to the narrator's arrival in Paris is told in great detail. The period from the arrival in Paris to the present day is summed up in a few capsules. It left me feeling like there were gaping holes in the narrator's story, things that might have better explained her present-day self. 

Milkman, by Anna Burns

I first heard of Milkman from my mother, who must have read it when it was pretty new. I remember her trying to explain it to me and it was a little hard to wrap my head around her description, but having now read it, I understand why. The description went something like, "It's about the troubles in Northern Ireland, and you don't know any of the characters' names, and there's a mysterious guy called 'Milkman' who everyone thinks is involved with the main character, but really she doesn't know him," which is completely accurate, but didn't give me much of a sense of the book. Though, my mother also said she thought I would like it, and she's usually good at knowing my taste in books, so it stuck with me in the back of my mind. Earlier this summer someone suggested we read it for our book club and I remembered my mom's recommendation, so I seconded the suggestion and eventually we selected it. 

I originally thought I was going to have to read it on my iPad -- I was able to get the ebook from the library -- but when I was in Ithaca a couple weeks ago browsing at bookshops (something that seemed so novel after all these months!), I saw a copy at The Odyssey Bookstore when I hadn't even thought to be looking for it, but I bought it on the spot and I'm so glad I did. I don't think I would have liked to read this as an ebook. The paragraphs are dense and long and I think that would have felt compounded on the screen. It took me two weeks to the day to finish Milkman, which somehow felt like an eternity. I had originally budgeted myself a week to read it ahead of our book club meeting, but thankfully others also found it slow going so we pushed it back a week and I finished in time. I don't know if it's that I've gotten used to finishing books in just a few days or if it's somehow compounded by being at home nearly all the time, but I don't think two weeks used to feel like a long time to be reading one book. There may have been a day or two where I didn't read it at all and there were definitely days where I only read 10-15 pages, but my pace did pick up for the last 100 pages or so. All this talk of how slow it felt is not to say I didn't enjoy it; quite the opposite. The narrator's voice is unique. I felt I could hear her and get inside her head. There was also something really beautiful that came through here and there: her latter years care for her young self. She was 18 years old, the middle of 10 or 11 children, living in the midst of this political and social situation that made her life and her options very narrow. You have the sense that she emerged from it into a wider world, and that the narrator is telling her young self: it's ok; you did ok; you could not have done differently.

One small reason I was interested in reading Milkman is that I had yet to read a book from Northern Ireland for my World Books Project -- I've read books from the Republic of Ireland and from the other 3 countries of the United Kingdom, so Northern Ireland seemed like a particular gap I needed to fill. And Milkman is very much about Northern Ireland. The political situation of Catholics in the North is not so much the backdrop for the events of the book as the milieu. Reading this book was pretty eye-opening for me. On the one hand, I did know things had been bad, but I guess I never quite internalized how bad. I visited Northern Ireland with my parents twice before the border opened; we had family friends in Belfast. The first time was in 1987 and we went by ferry I believe from Scotland, and I can't say I remember much about that crossing or visit. The second time was around Easter in 1989 or 1990 and we drove up from the Republic of Ireland and I will never forget that crossing. I was stretched out in the back seat of the car. As we stopped at the border, two soldiers were positioned on either side of our car, each pointing a gun at one of the four car windows. As we got to Belfast, there were bonfires burning all over. My mother tells me people were burning the pope in effigy. The city center was closed to traffic and there were checkpoints everywhere. It made a big impression, and yet somehow, perhaps because I was 13 and didn't comprehend the significance of what I saw (I had never had a gun pointed at me at a border crossing before, but then again neither had I crossed many borders), perhaps because I was just there a few days, I really didn't understand the scope of the Troubles. Milkman drove it home: the divided communities; the isolation; the mistrust; the dead or fled members of every family. 

How To Travel without Seeing, by Andrés Neuman

Reading How To Travel without Seeing at this moment -- when one can't travel at all -- was an interesting experience. I think I mentioned in my last post that I've been writing about travel in the absence of being able to travel. My project is almost the inverse of Neuman's in this book: what I've been recording are memories of travel, sometimes digging far into the past; this book is an in-the-moment record of Neuman's observations on a book tour (in two parts) through Latin America. 

The familiar and now absent (from my life at least) rhythm of airports, immigration, and travel pulses through this book, but that wasn't the only jarring aspect of reading this book. Neuman wrote this book in 2009, though it wasn't published in English until 2016. I would not have recalled, but 2009 was the year the world was on alert for swine flu. Particularly during the first legs of Neuman's journey, there was an odd ring of the present -- or of travel during those last weeks before the present. (I managed to take ten flights (and also to get off an eleventh after boarding, when the restrictions on European travel were announced in March) in the first few weeks of 2020, and I watched as the number of masks and the general tension at airports increased over that space of time.) Neuman crosses checkpoints where temperatures are taken, where health forms must be completed, where masks are worn. I think if I had read this a year ago, I would have found this surprising. What I found surprising reading it now was that I had missed it before. I did travel some in 2009, but I guess not to places where the swine flu was. 

In fact, my reaction to the book's treatment of swine flu was just one example of an experience I had again and again while reading How To Travel without Seeing. The year 2009 is not so long ago, but (undoubtedly with some exceptions I can't think of right now) I am hard pressed to name an event that happened in 2009. Ok: I know there was Obama's inauguration at the beginning of the year. In fact, it was rather an eventful year in my personal life, but larger global events -- aside from the Obama presidency, and all that goes along with it -- there's nothing I could swear happened in 2009, and not a year earlier, a year later. But this book, written as it was as a (more or less) pure reflection of the present in 2009, had all kinds of references to current events that struck me: was that in 2009? and was that also in 2009? Much of this was related to Latin American politics, which I can't say I've ever followed closely. So, at the time of the book's writing, Lula was president of Brazil and was an established popular leader in South America; Evo Morales was just completing his first term as president of Bolivia; Chávez was still alive and Nicolás Maduro was an ambassador of some sort (he comes up!); FARC was still active in Colombia, but things were changing fast there; and -- the event that was most notable in the book, in part because it coincided perfectly with the author's time in Latin America, as well as preventing his planned stop in Tegucigalpa -- the coup was taking place in Honduras, which unlike everything else I've mentioned, I don't even remember as an event.

As well as following local politics, Neuman makes a point to seek out local writers, and a good portion of the book is devoted to excerpted pieces or reflections he's had on reading poems, essays, and stories by authors from the countries he visited. Most were not writers with whom I was familiar, though of course the big names come up (again and again): Borges, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, Bolaño. I was gratified to find Eduardo Halfon's writing come up when Neuman visited Guatemala (and slightly disappointed that Horacio Castellanos Moya's did not come up when he visited El Salvador). I looked up a couple of the writers whose names I didn't know and didn't find anything in English, though I'd like to do a more thorough investigation.

A couple chapters in, I was trying to figure out what this book reminded me of and I came to an unexpected conclusion: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. It's not just that it's similarly fragmented, though obviously that's part of it. It's definitely more of a personal piece, and also very rooted in the present. But the mixture of observations and fragments of other writing, the sense of a thesis behind it all, some thoughts just one sentence (e.g., "The sharp Paraguayan sigh."), it all had a feeling that reminded me of the Arcades Project. I can tell you the line where it hit me, from page 74: "Here the cars are like cable cars." (Though I can't tell you why that was the line where it hit me.)

Grove: A Field Novel, by Esther Kinsky

I started Grove toward the end of July. I read it for a week, set it aside for a week, read it for a week, set it aside for a week, and thought I would read it for another week before finishing, but in fact the last section took me just two days. My slow progress and long breaks should not be seen as criticisms: I loved this book. But it reads very slowly, and it wasn't the sort of book I could sit down and read for a long stretch. I also, as I mentioned in a previous post, found myself writing a lot while I was reading this book. I'm not much of a poetry person, but more than once I've read interviews with authors who say that poetry is what they read when they are in the midst of writing something. For me, I think this book served the same purpose. (And Esther Kinsky is, in fact, a poet as well.) The book is very much about the language it consists of and the images it evokes. I don't know if that makes any sense. 

Grove is divided into three parts, which cover several trips to Italy taken by the narrator. The first and third part are solo trips in some rough present, in the wake of the death of a partner, about whom you learn little. Both are winter trips to out of the way places, or places reserved for summer vacations. In the middle section, the narrator recalls what seems to have been frequent childhood trips to Italy with her family. Her father, repelled by eels, and fascinated by the Etruscans, Byzantine mosaics, and Fra Angelico, brings his family to Italy to follow his passions. 

The subtitle "A Field Novel" is not totally clear in its meaning, but much of the book is centered on observations of the natural world in the villages the narrator visits, particularly birds and trees. Eels make unexpectedly frequent appearances in this book. There are observations on the built world as well, particularly in its run down state. All of these observations seem to be filters for the narrator processing her loss, of her partner and of her father before that. Another recurring theme is places of the living and places of the dead. The narrator visits many, many cemeteries, but the places of the living she visits aren't very inhabited by the living either. 

I could say much more, but I won't. This book is gorgeous.

The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead

I haven't been in the mood to read. Or perhaps I haven't been reading the right things. Or perhaps (and I do think this is the root of it) my mental energy has been sapped by work and I haven't had it in me to read. (Is that different from not being "in the mood"? Who can say.)

The week before last, I continued to read Grove in small bits and I got through the second section (out of three) in it. I also participated in a week-long #1000wordsofsummer beginning August 10. The two-week #1000wordsofsummer hit at a time when I was very busy with work and I didn't feel up to it, but when this one came up, even though I was again (still?) very busy with work, I decided to give it a go. I wrote upwards of 1000 words on 6 of the 7 days (and 500 and change on one of them), and ended the week with some 9500 words. (On one of those days, I wrote the >1000-word love letter to markets that was my last post here.) Grove turns out to be a very good book to read when I want to write. Or maybe just a very good book for what I've mostly been writing, which is memories of travel. That is, in fact, much of what Grove is, and it's definitely been part of my inspiration.

Last weekend, in a very unusual turn of events this side of COVID, I didn't read at all. I had to work half a day or so on Saturday, and after that I just laid around on the couch for a while, cooked dinner at 4pm, and then watched TV the rest of the evening. Sunday, I ran two errands, which involved walking 4 miles in total, and I discovered that I haven't kept in shape quite as much as I'd hoped (my legs were very sore on Monday). But it was nice to be out. It was in the 60s and rainy here, and I wore long pants and a jacket and it felt pleasantly cool. Monday morning, I thought about resuming Grove, but decided to take a week away and started The Intuitionist instead. Given that the last time I took a break from Grove, I chose a 700-page book and then also had to read another book for a book club, I thought I'd be smarter and pick something short, something that might last me a few days, and then I could go back to Grove refreshed, or at least sated in my desire for plot. But that's not quite how it worked out. It wasn't The Intuitionist's fault. I made decent headway Monday and Tuesday, but I barely touched it Wednesday and didn't at all on Thursday. I thought I could catch up on Friday because my day theoretically ends early on summer Fridays, but I didn't actually end early, and only had a little time with it before I had to do other things. Finally, yesterday, I went back to it and read in earnest. And then I read the full second half ("half" in how the book is broken up, it's actually less than half) this morning before I had to work again at 12:30.

It seems like The Intuitionist is the Colson Whitehead novel that gets recommended to me most often. I did enjoy it quite a bit, but I don't think it has the power of his two most recent books. In addition to those two, the other book of Whitehead's I've read is John Henry Days, about the to-do surrounding the issuance of a commemorative John Henry stamp, which I found slow going, but rewarding in the end. The Intuitionist reminded me more of it than the others. There was one thing peculiar to me that made The Intuitionist an interesting read. The book centers on the work of elevator inspectors. In my day job I work with the people who develop the elevator safety codes. One of my favorite people I know through work was personally responsible for this work at Otis, until his retirement several years ago. I kept wondering if he knew about this book. I'm half tempted to send it to him. I wonder what he would think.

A Love Letter to Some Markets I've Visited

For me, the Marché Jean-Talon is the ur-market. The first time I visited Jean-Talon, in Montreal's Little Italy, was in August of 2007. I had taken the train up to Montreal for a few days to visit a friend who was living there, and we went out there to pick up some produce for our dinner. Jean-Talon in August is a sight to see: vegetables for miles; everything big (the vegetables are bigger in Canada because of the long hours of sunlight in summer - it’s true!) and bright and bursting. The colors: green, obviously, but so many shades of green! And red, of course, but also purple and yellow, and orange. Buckets of red and yellow tomatoes; of green, orange and yellow peppers; of purple and pale green and golden and white cauliflower. The most beautiful mushrooms, of every variety from white to golden to earthy brown. And berries: strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries. A giant tub of ground cherries is $20 Canadian. And let’s not forget the plants and flowers. Potted pepper plants with tiny red chilis, basil, rosemary, and other herbs I couldn’t identify. Bunches of dried purple, orange, and yellow flowers. 

Since that first visit, I’ve made a point to go to Marché Jean-Talon every time I’ve gone to Montreal. It’s the largest permanent open air market in North America, though obviously the selection shrinks dramatically in the Quebecois winter. In the summer, the market stands selling produce extend well outside the structure, but in winter, the central part of the market remains open, the bakers and butchers and cheesemongers still open for business, and a scaled back outdoor market with whatever is in season (or whatever never goes out of season). I’ve also sought out Montreal’s other markets. None is as impressive as Jean Talon, of course, but each has its charm and sensibility. 

Perhaps Jean-Talon opened my eyes to markets as a concept. While New York has a few nominal markets (the Essex Street Market, which I never visited in its traditional hey day; the Chelsea Market, which feels too segmented into shops to be a proper market; and the glut of food halls that have made homes in the city overy the past few years), there has never seemed to me to be a market culture here. The Union Square green market, and some of its smaller counterparts, are perhaps the closer comparisons, but unlike at the Montreal markets or the ones I’ve visited since in other parts of the world, you should expect to pay more at our green markets than you would if you bought the food elsewhere -- admittedly, for higher quality food. (This is perhaps a peculiarity of American farming and food costs, which I don’t know much about, but have heard anecdotally from many European visitors that our food seems to them outrageously expensive. And I, on the flip side, am always struck at how inexpensive food is when I travel.) Or maybe it’s just New York. When I lived in Boston, I remember going to Haymarket on Saturday mornings. There, the produce is dirt cheap (and often on its last legs). My father, who lives in Philadelphia, does the bulk of his shopping at the Italian market, where he might pay $1 for a bucket of tomatoes or peppers. The Italian market.

The first time I visited Palermo, in 2015, I got a little map of the city which showed each of the city’s three main markets and the specialties of each: the Mercato di Ballarò, the city’s oldest market; the Mercato il Capo, where you can buy clothes and cell phone accessories alongside your vegetables; and the Vucciria night market for street food. Having by this time visited many markets, I was expecting a market structure, if not a fully enclosed space. I walked up to the Mercato di Ballarò, along the streets lined with vendors, wondering where the main market was. I turned north and walked toward the Mercato il Capo, and then as I approached the Porta Carini, past roughly constructed tables heaped with vegetables and fruits, with tarps stretched overhead, I saw the prototype for the Philadelphia Italian market. How had I failed to recognize it? The Italian market indeed.

Elsewhere in Italy, I’ve seen enclosed markets and covered markets with market stalls. In Grassano, in the hills of Basilicata, I stopped in the Mercato Coperto di Piazza della Libertà, a small, rather ugly indoor market with vegetable stalls, butchers, a fish stall, and a couple alimentari stalls. It was mid-morning on a weekday and the market was quiet, with only about half the stalls open for business. I went in to use the restroom, but paused on my way to have a look around. If I ever want to feel down about American food culture, I need just remind myself that in a backwater Italian town of 5,000, you can walk into the dingy little market in the town center and have at your fingertips all the varieties of cheeses, the cured meats, the fresh meats, the olives, the oil, everything you could wish for, and whatever produce is in season. It breaks my heart.

In Venice, where square footage on land is scarce, the Mercato di Rialto takes over the space under the tall arches of a building that’s raised one level up (ground floors are risky in Venice anyway) and runs right up to the canal side. Though distinctly Venetian in form, right down to the ogee arch on the windows of the upper level, the market hall is reminiscent of the petites halles market structures found in many a French village. The market in Mirepoix, in Ariège, is on Mondays in one of these structures. It sits directly across from the church on one side of the town center, but the market stalls - couverts - continue under the arcades that go fully around the central square.

Marché Jean-Talon has been around for less than a century, while the market in Mirepoix has been going for hundreds of years. But you can see the latter reflected in the former. The style of the market is very French. But situated, as it is, in the heart of Montreal’s Italian community, that influence is there as well. Many of the shops that surround the market sell Italian specialty items. Maybe that’s part of what makes it so special for me. It’s a market of the new world, and the first market I fell in love with.

Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata

As I wrote yesterday, I had a book I had to finish ahead of a book club meeting this morning. That book was Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata, which was this month's selection for the Idlewild Books Women in Translation book club. (As it happens, August is Women in Translation Month. Go read some women in translation!)

This is a slim book (160 pages, but smaller than standard trade paperback size) that I read in a couple hours yesterday. The narrator, Keiko, is a 36-year-old woman who has been working in a convenience store for half her life. It's never spelled out, but Keiko is likely neuroatypical. Her job at the convenience store comes with training and a manual that serve as a model for being for Keiko. She recognizes that she is not what other people consider normal, but she learns to appear normal by mimicking them, with a deep understanding of what she's doing. She borrows other people's patterns of speech, but will combine different patterns to suit the occasion. Her deep self-awareness makes her aware of this behavior in other people too, where they probably don't even see it themselves. For instance, she observes that her sister has changed after she has a baby, and she attributes it to the time she is likely spending with other parents. Her observation of other people was, for me, one of the most interesting aspects of the book. 

Convenience Store Woman shared certain similarities with a book I read earlier this year, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. Like Keiko, Eleanor devotes much of her own attention to appearing normal and generally going unnoticed. But Eleanor suffers from PTSD, and her story is one of recovery and entering "normal" society. Keiko goes some length toward trying to take a path that would seem more typical for a woman her age, but her self-discovery is that she belongs in the convenience store. 

The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas

I dug myself into a bit of a hole last weekend. I still have The Famished Road and Light Years sitting unfinished (187 pages into the former and 160 pages into the latter) on the table beside my couch. About two weeks ago, after finishing Emma, I started a new book: Grove by Esther Kinsky. It's a beautifully written book about loss and solitude and travel and Italy, which I will write about eventually when I finish it. I read it for five days, Monday through Friday of the week before last, and arrived, on the Friday, at the end of Part One. It was very slow going. The chapters are short, which keeps things moving in a way, but I found myself pausing a lot, thinking a lot, writing a little, and actually starting up my Italian studies again. (All of these are positives, it's true.) But Grove is not the sort of book you dive into for a weekend of reading and that was the sort of book I thought I needed last weekend. So, I set Grove aside and I picked up The Three Musketeers last Saturday. I read about 70 pages that day and another 70 or so on Sunday. Almost immediately I had the thought that it had been foolish of me to take a break from one book with another book that was nearly 700 pages long -- especially foolish considering there was yet another book I needed to read for a book club meeting a week later (that is, tomorrow as I'm writing this). The visions of arriving at this weekend -- today -- with five unfinished books on my side table loomed over me. Fortunately, as the days passed -- even as I was back to working during the week -- my reading pace picked up. Late Thursday, it occurred to me I might actually be able to finish The Three Musketeers on Friday (thanks to my work's summer Fridays early closure) and start today fresh with just my book club book to finish. And I did: I read just over 200 pages yesterday and finished it just in time for my weekly Friday night movie club screening.

This was the second Dumas book I've read. The first was The Count of Monte Cristo, which I enjoyed despite the poor translation (which I have written about previously). The edition of The Three Musketeers that I read was translated by Richard Pevear, which was part of the attraction for me. I knew this wouldn't have the stumbling adherence to the French syntax that made The Count of Monte Cristo so awkward. I hoped that my enjoyment of the story would benefit as a result. I was not disappointed. I also feel fortunate that I didn't actually know the story of The Three Musketeers at all. In fact, my primary awareness of them came from crosswords, where they are occasionally answers (Athos most frequently), and which was how I came to know their names (and which was also the source of much confusion on my part, prior to reading the book, about the fact that there were clearly four of them, not three). But beyond the names, I knew nothing. The book is an action-packed delight. The distinct characters of the musketeers themselves, and of their lackeys, were wonderfully entertaining. Milady, the evil genius villain, is incredible. I'd love to read an alternate version centering her story! 

Emma, by Jane Austen

I very rarely reread books. I like the idea of rereading, but with limited time and unlimited books, the previously unread always seems to get priority of place for me. I first read Emma in 2005. I was something of a latecomer to Jane Austen, as I wrote when I reread Pride and Prejudice in 2016. I first read that book in November of 2004 when I was subletting an apartment and ran out of my own reading material. About a year after that I went back and read the remainder of her novels in the space of just a few weeks (pausing somewhere in the middle to also read The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling). If my record-keeping is accurate, I read Emma right in the middle of the pack: Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park before; Northanger Abbey, (Tom Jones), Lady Susan, and Persuasion after. Reading them all in such quick succession was, I think, not such a good idea in the end. They all kind of blended together. For reasons that probably don't have much to do with merit, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey are the ones that stood out for me. (And Tom Jones, which I adored, and was, I have to say, a refreshing break from Jane Austen.)

I started rereading Emma back in February to refresh my memory ahead of the new film adaptation. But this was during that period this year when I was sick and none of my reading was going well and I set it aside after about 25 pages. I didn't think I'd go back any time soon, but then my friend group who have been watching movies together (that is to say, simultaneously in our own homes) throughout quarantine selected Clueless as our film for last week. I had just finished Romance in Marseille and Emma seemed like it would be a fun change from what I'd been reading lately. 

My experience going back to Emma was similar to my experience going back to Pride and Prejudice. In the period since I first read the book, I've seen multiple TV and film adaptations, multiple times. The story and its twists are now quite familiar to me; perhaps too familiar. In fact, the moment when Emma offends Miss Bates and is lectured by Mr. Knightley is, I think, one of the reasons I stopped reading it in February: I dreaded that moment. (Today, I read it without too much pain.) I think it took me a hundred pages or more to really get beyond the anticipation of everything and fall into the text, but once I did, it was a delight. 

Romance in Marseille, by Claude McKay

Romance in Marseille was published for the first time this year -- nearly a century after it was written. It's the story of Lafala, a ship-worker from an unnamed locale in colonized West Africa, who stows away on a boat heading to New York out of Marseille. After being discovered, he's locked in a freezing bathroom on the boat for the bulk of the crossing. On his arrival in New York, he finds he has lost the use of his legs, and he is taken to a hospital where they are amputated. Things take an unexpected turn when a fellow patient -- a Black man from Harlem -- puts Lafala in touch with a lawyer who sues the shipping company, which settles for a large payment. The company is made to provide Lafala with high quality artificial limbs and he's shipped back to Marseille first class and finds a new quality of life there with his money, though without his legs. 

The most interesting part of this book is the portrait of 1920s Marseille itself. In the bars and brothels in Quayside, sailors and workers of different races from all over the world mingle. Lafala's circle includes other Africans, African-Americans, West Indians, among others. The common thread of the African Diaspora and life at sea binds them together. Lafala's love interest is Sudanese, by way of Morocco. The Marseille of this book is a global city, a port connected to the whole world. It made me curious about Marseille, and also left me wondering if anyplace like this exists in the present day.

The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy, by Antal Szerb

Have you ever read just one book by an author and felt prepared to claim that author among your favorites? I wrote about it rather poorly, but that was how I felt after reading Antal Szerb's Journey By Moonlight. That book, which I read just about a year ago, went right to my heart, my mind, my inside. After reading it I started searching out Szerb's other works in a passive way; when I found myself in a bookshop, I'd usually remember to see if they had anything. They never did. Journey By Moonlight is his most well known work by a long shot. I'm not even sure there is a U.S. publisher for his other works. Early on in quarantine, remembering my luck ordering used books from the UK in the fall, I thought what the hell, and ordered 3 of his books in these pretty Pushkin Press editions.* 

I'm not sure what precisely drove me to pull out The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy this morning. I certainly didn't expect I would finish it by this evening (though it is a small book: just 105 pages and smaller than standard trade paperback size). The book is an account, told in small, episodic observations, of a trip Szerb made to Italy in August of 1936. The Spanish Civil War hangs in the background (in the first chapter, Szerb tells us he wanted to go to Spain but settled on Italy due to current events, and the situation in Spain pops up here and there). Fascism in Italy is more in the foreground; he bears witness to it in his accounts of the newspapers he reads, the people he sees on trains and along his travels. The tensions elsewhere in Europe are palpable. In Venice, he notes that hotels where French is spoken are expensive, while those where German is spoken are cheap. While I know something of the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I don't have a great sense of Hungarian history or culture specifically. It's hard for me to wrap my head around what a vacation in Italy would be like for a Hungarian of Jewish heritage in 1936, even as I was reading an account of just that. (He does touch on the reaction he receives when he tells people he's from Hungary, which seems to be a mild fascination.) Szerb's passing references to Hungarian writers before him whose names meant nothing to me left me feeling rather ignorant. (Besides Szerb, the only Hungarian writer I've read is Sandor Marai and Imre Kertész is the only other I can name off the top of my head.)

Tracing parts of the route covered in Journey by Moonlight, in 1936 Szerb visited Venice, Vicenza, Lake Garda, Bologna, Ravenna, San Marino, Ferrara, and Trieste. Venice gets the most attention, and several of the other cities get just one short chapter. There are odd chapters on other topics too, on the heat, on the Fascist populous, on traveling alone. Unsurprisingly, that last chapter - called Solitude - struck a chord with me. 

When I started The Third Tower this morning, I tweeted, "I read the first two pages of this book and I already know I'm about to have my heart broken" with the photo at right. This journal turned out indeed to be an account of Szerb's farewell visit to Italy. War arrived in earnest not long after this. Szerb was put in a concentration camp in 1944 and was killed there in 1945. He was not even as old as I am now. 

*While you're there, I encourage you to peruse the author pictures on the Pushkin Press authors page, which I find unaccountably amusing. I was surprised to stumble across a photo of the previous author I read, Eduardo Halfon, while I was scrolling down to Szerb.

Monastery, by Eduardo Halfon

I picked up Eduardo Halfon's first book (or rather, the first that was translated into English), The Polish Boxer after finding it sitting on the display table at Idlewild Books, and I read it in early 2017. (It made my notable books of the year list.) After finishing it, I immediately put it in the mail to my father. Reading it had somehow reminded me of him, though I'd be hard pressed to articulate why. Some months ago, to my surprise and delight, I found Monastery at the thrift store near my office. I hadn't even known Halfon had a second book in English. (And now that I look, I see he has a third!) 

Both books are collections of stories, told in the first person, by a narrator who, when he's named, is named Eduardo Halfon. They read as episodes in the life of the author -- some threads weave through the narratives continuously, others pop out only in a couple places. The interconnectedness, I think, makes these stories mean more together than they would individually -- and all together, they're quite beautiful. (It's notable that neither book presents itself as a book of short stories, though that's really what they are.)

Halfon the narrator (and I think we can presume the author) has an unusual background. Born in Guatemala and raised partly there and partly in the U.S., his grandparents were Jews. Three of the four were Lebanese, but the one we hear most about is his Polish grandfather, who was interned in a succession of concentration camps starting in 1939 at the age of 16, and who moved to Guatemala after the war. This family history and multiplicity of identity is one of the recurring themes in both books. There are at least two moments in Monastery as the narrator is traveling through smaller towns in Guatemala and, on being asked where he's from, attests that he's Guatemalan -- from here! but he doubts it himself, and wonders why.* Halfon travels not just in Guatemala, but to Europe and to Israel (and in The Polish Boxer to the U.S. and some other places too), never quite feeling that he belongs, although he has ties to all these places. This feeling creates the perspective, and the distance to observe, that sets the mood in both these books.

* This reminded me of one of my favorite moments in There There which I didn't write about because I was so exhausted on the day (week, weeks?) that I wrote about it. Self-doubt about identity and being "truly" Native is something that several characters in the book experience. The teenage Orvil Red Feather is one of these characters, but when he gets to the Powwow and goes into the locker room to put on his regalia, he finds himself surrounded by other Native men, who are also putting on their regalia, dressing up as Indians like he is, and in that moment he realizes he is one of them. They're not putting on a costume and pretending to be something they're not, and neither is he.